Egypt & American Exceptionalism

CALLER: Yes. I’m here, and I’m very glad to talk to you. And is it all right if I call you ‘Rush’?

RUSH: Yeah. Feel free.

CALLER: ‘Cause I feel like we’re friends. (coughs) Excuse me.

RUSH: That’s all right.

CALLER: Here’s my question: Our country is very young and very new, and we’re expected to do a lot of things throughout the world.

RUSH: That’s right.

CALLER: Yet I’m looking at Egypt, and I see that they have had some sort of organized government for 5,000 years. Wouldn’t you think they’d get it straight now?

RUSH: (chuckles)

CALLER: It’s perplexing.

RUSH: Boy, you don’t know it, but in the hands of a much less qualified host, you have just laid a perfect trap for a less qualified host to just stumble into and end his career.

CALLER: (giggling)

RUSH: I, as a highly trained broadcast specialist with seasoning and experience, recognize the trap. You may not even be aware of the trap that you’ve set here.

CALLER: I didn’t. I’m just a person here living in Clarksville.

RUSH: You’re just a person. Okay. They’ve been around 5000 years; we’ve been around 250. Can’t they get it right?

CALLER: Yeah. That is my question.

RUSH: All right, well, who are ‘they’?

CALLER: Anyone in Egypt who has the ability to —

RUSH: Right. Well, who are the Egyptians?

CALLER: The Egyptian people?

RUSH: Yeah?

CALLER: The people who live there.

RUSH: Where is Egypt?

CALLER: It’s a country.

RUSH: Where?

CALLER: (coughs) Excuse me.

RUSH: Where is Egypt?

CALLER: In the Middle East.

RUSH: Technically it’s part of Middle East, but actually it’s on a continent. What continent is it on?

CALLER: It’s on the African continent.

RUSH: Okay. Now, the less experienced host would end his career right here and there. I know not to go there, in answering your question.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: I remember… I guess it was seventh grade, junior high. I even remember the teacher, Mrs. Langdon, when she started teaching us about Ancient Egypt. I got absorbed. I became fascinated with the things I was learning about. King Tut, mummies, all of it. The pyramids. I became totally captivated by it, and I remember asking, ‘What happened to it?’ You know, I’m, what, 13 in the seventh grade? ‘What happen to it, because it was so advanced for its day?’ Way advanced. When it was a Roman colony, it wasn’t even close to what it was in the ancient Pharaoh Obama days. And so the caller says, ‘What happened to it? They’ve been around 5000 years.’ The answer, folks, really not complicated at all.

This is what happens to totalitarianism.

There has never been, in Egypt, a genuinely republican, freedom government. There just hasn’t been. I remember in the early days of this broadcast’s history, I’d get people calling here — even when I worked in Sacramento, I would get the calls from people — saying, ‘Well, African culture was leading the world at one time but then conquerors, conquistadors and others came along and stole it. They stole the culture,’ which always perplexed me. Okay, you go someplace where there is a culture and then you steal it, right? Well, what’s to stop the people who had the culture stolen from simply keeping the culture going? Culture is a behavior. Culture is… I mean, you might steal the libraries, you might steal the churches or whatever, but you can’t steal the values. How did that happen?

You can adopt ’em, absorb them and so forth. As far as, you know, Obama and his father are concerned, what happened to everybody over there is Great Britain. That’s exactly it. Great Britain is what happened. Great Britain is what happened to India. Great Britain is what happened to Ethiopia. Great Britain is what happened to Egypt. They came and colonized everything. Lord Mountbatten! Lord Mountbatten was despised by the anti-colonialites, but he is Prince Charles’ favorite human being and No. 1 mentor. Lord Mountbatten. So what happened to it? Why haven’t they ‘matriculated’ the ball down the field and become what we have?

That’s a question that I ask every time I make a public appearance. Have you ever wondered why…? I don’t care if it’s Egypt, Italy, it doesn’t matter what nation you ask about. They have all been around thousands of years. The ChiComs in one degree or another, the Japanese, the Koreans. I don’t care where you go. The Mongols. I don’t care where you go in this world, they’ve all been around longer as nations than the United States has. How is it, then, that a population of less than 300 million people, in less than 275 years, came to rule the planet as a force of good with economic output that had never before seen. Lifestyles, standards of living, medical advancement, technological advancement, invention.

The twentieth century alone in this country! It’s never before happened. Why? As I say, we’re not better people. Our DNA is not special. We’re not smarter. We’re not better builders. Hell, the Romans were amazing builders with what they had to work with. Why didn’t it last? Well, there are debates about that. But regardless, nobody has ever come close to us — and we’re but a speck of sand on the human timeline compared to some of these other nations, like she said: Egypt and other African nations. Five thousand years they’ve been around, documented history. Well, there has to be a reason. There has to be an explanation for how we were able to do this, and in that explanation, you’re gonna find many of the reasons why there is America hatred in this country.

Because there’s a lot of guilt over the fact that we did this. A lot of people think that the only way we could have become the superpower that we became was by stealing and misappropriating the things from other people: Their valuable natural resources, their best and brightest minds. We stole it for our own selfish reasons. There hasn’t been a genuinely free, republican form of government in most of history for most of the world. That’s the answer. We have it. That’s American exceptionalism. We’re the first. That’s why those of us who love the Constitution genuinely love it. You can call it a ‘fetish,’ I don’t care. It’s why we genuinely love it. It is that special. There’s only one earth, and there’s only one chance we all have to live on it.

We are Americans. Never before in the course of human existence has there been a place like this, and it’s not because of where the place is. It’s a factor in certain ways, but whatever we don’t have we import. Whatever we have excess of, we practically give away to people. Any time a disaster happens on this planet where do they look first? If anybody around the world needs serious medical treatment, why do they go? Hell, they’ll endow entire wings of hospitals to be treated here if they have to. It’s because of the Constitution. It’s because of the structure of our government, the nature of our existence. It’s all there in our founding documents. We have been the least shackled people in human history.

The full measure of human potential’s been on display since the founding of this country (actually, since before the founding, because that was part of the founding of this country) and it continues to be on display. That is why so many of us cringe when we’ve got a president running around the world apologizing for this country. It’s why we cringe when we see people who look at it, don’t like it or hate it and see the need to reform it and spread government, spread misery so that everybody’s ‘equal,’ questioning our exceptionalism and suggesting that we ‘need to find out what life is really like around the world, to see what we’ve been imposing on people,’ and of course it’s the exact opposite. I’ve said this before. I’ll say it again because it’s a great illustration.

I’m watching Phil Donahue, his afternoon syndicated show, and he had Laura Dern on there. She’s 18 years old, as a guest, and she was practically hysterical describing what it’s like to be an 18 year old to get up every day with the threat of nuclear holocaust happening on that day. And Phil, of course, was doing everything he could to relate and understand and wringing his hands and said, ‘Yes,’ were it not for the accident of his birth, he could be living in squalor and poverty in Mexico. The accident of his birth. Well, if he wants to look at it that way, fine. But here’s the difference: Poor old Phil Donahue was overwhelmed with guilt over where he was born. I remember watching.

I was shouting at the TV, ‘Hey, Phil? Rather than feeling guilty, why don’t you feel proud and why don’t you do what you can to help spread our way of life to everybody else around the world?’ That’s what we want. We want everybody in this country to experience the affluence, the opportunity that’s possible here. It’s why we don’t understand the constant drumbeat of running it down and ripping it to shreds and questioning its fairness and its validation. We hear we’re racist, sexist, bigot, homophobes. They’re non sequiturs. Those things do not equal what this country is. So, yeah, it gets very frustrating when people want to tear this country apart, and it gets very scary when so many of ’em who feel that way have now real positions of power, both in the Congress and in the executive branch.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: Peter in Seattle, you’re great for holding on. Thank you very much, and welcome to the program.

CALLER: Thanks very much, Rush. It’s amazing to see you. My mom listened to your show back 20 years ago and I can still hear her laughing in my head about you using the term feminazi. So it’s an honor to speak with you.

RUSH: Thank you very much, sir.

CALLER: Thank you. I just wanted to say something relative to giving the Egyptians time to get their revolution together and to have a clear plan for what the future holds. What was the time between the Boston Tea Party in the United States and the time we wrote the Constitution?

RUSH: What was the time between the Boston Tea Party —

CALLER: And the time the Constitution was written in the United States of America.

RUSH: Time is short. You tell me.

CALLER: Sixteen years.

RUSH: Sixteen years.

CALLER: And I just think about the Egyptian people, 30 years under Mubarak is the equivalent of us being 30 years under Jimmy Carter. That is a lot of frustration.

RUSH: Well, now, that is an interesting way to put it, or 30 years under Obama.

CALLER: Oh. (laughing)

RUSH: He’s right, though, the years are 1775, 1789. So in this sense are you supporting the Egyptian peoples?

CALLER: I am supporting the Egyptian people. And the other thing is I think one institution they have that is tremendously powerful and positive for their country is the army. Look at the restraint the army has showed and the respect it has for their Egyptian culture and their Egyptian people.

RUSH: Well —

CALLER: I believe that the army is a force that could be the stabilizing force during a period of transition.

RUSH: You are very shrewd, sir. You’re the first to mention it on this program. An interesting aspect of this is the position, the role that the Egyptian army is playing and will play when this is all over. Thanks, Peter, very much. I appreciate it.